Saturday, December 9

Behind the Scenes - Part1

In the present technology boom there are many programming languages, new technologies getting updated almost every day.In my company I was asked to assist in selecting the PHP developers. My self and my collegue interviewed many prospects that the consultancy had sent. We almost interviewed 20 members in both telephonic and in person. Since the position was not closed our HR was really concerned about the way we both are interviewing the candidates and he started to join the panel during the interview.Coming to interview you won't believe it is such a simple and basic stuff that anybody can answer.Few questions from my collegue are

"What are the storage types that MySQL supports?""What is the difference between InnoDB and MyISAM ?"

Almost majority of candidates we interviewed went blank and few managed to mumble on first question and failed on the second one.Where is the problem?Not to blame on the sophisticated tools that are made available in the market. We are so used that we often forget the way these tools work. To explain the above scenario many php developers (OpenSource developers) use a tool called phpMyAdmin to access,edit,populate the MySQL databse and these tools will provide easy ways to create database tables, structure, just by selection, few drop downs and then click go/finish button. But we should not forget that fundamentally even the tools uses the query to carry on the commands.While using the tools and expertising them we should also understand the logic behind it.